Prototyping – Fake it to Make it Big

Speed is one thing that the mobile industry embodies through and through. From the continued growth of the market to the desired speed of applications as well as phones. This speedy industry is also hasty in the discovery and consumption of the “in thing” when it comes to mobile applications. The mobile app developer has had to adapt to this speedy world when it comes to the frequency of app development as the app life cycles are becoming increasingly short. This has brought the importance of prototyping to the forefront as wasted development time is not only time consuming but also expensive.

What is prototyping?

Prototyping is the process of creating an early approximation of a final product or in this case an application. You can build the whole product without worrying about building the complex backend technology and putting in place the infrastructure. The prototype is created so that developers can test, iterate, and test yet again and rebuild until a desired or acceptable outcome is achieved. A prototype should be built for the lowest price possible to allow development to be cost effective.

Benefits of Prototyping

Being an Iterative process i.e. refining process prototyping has the following benefits:

Improvement of accuracy when it comes to the application’s functionality and system’s requirements helping to smooth over the user interface

Prototype provides the client as well as co-workers with a demonstration of your application during the development process

Detection of issues early on in the development process

Provides the developer with the capability to estimate development costs, timelines and resource requirements

Prototyping enables the developer to exchange feedback and explore ideas with the client and end user aiding in the creation of the desirable end result. This also gives the client and end user a greater appreciation for the end product.

Prototyping Vs. Not Prototyping

Prototyping has some very clear benefits with some listed above it also has some faults or disadvantages too. One being the insufficient analysis of the entire project as the developers can at times be too focus on the prototype. This can lead to poorly develop applications as functionality or specifications will be neglected or put together haphazardly. The expense of development of a prototype may be high in some cases. Prototype development can be time-consuming if not implement correctly while its intended purpose is to hasten the development process. While prototyping can have its faults especially when the process is not undertaken correctly the not undergoing the process has little to no benefits as it is time consuming and expensive especially if you have to rewrite code which consumes resources.

A prototype not only has the ability to inspire the person working on the application but also their co-workers enabling them to gain the drive to work even harder in their own projects. The 50% of a developer’s time is spent developing applications and rest of the time is dedicated to working with engineers. A prototype reduces this time as it answers a lot of the questions they might have.

Final thought

With 59% of applications not generating enough income to break even prototyping is all the more important. This process has been made easy with the availability of numerous tools available online on good example being SavahApp.com